Validation

The purposes are to: find, and hopefully fix, file corruption ... when it exists.

It is not possible to guarantee that either goal will be achieved. Nor is it possible to guarantee that a Validate will not create a problem of its own. [Though I believe it is not likely.]

There is zero risk, if you Validate a Copy of your Quicken data ... and revert to the file from which the (then) Validated Copy was made.

And, in my opinion, there is very little risk in using a Validated Copy of your Quicken data. But I believe that no one - not even anyone at Intuit - could give you an absolute guarantee that a Validate would never create any problem, or that you would be able to determine that there was a problem.

In my opinion: if a Validated Quicken Copy appears to be viable; it's a better bet than a file that didn't appear to be viable before the Validation.

And having a good backup strategy will help reduce the odds in your favor even further.

Just to clarify: Validate can do more than just "check" for problems; it can, and many times does, fix problems. But a super-validate will sometimes make more fixes than a plain validate. I don't know the exact conditions that cause that to be true.

"John Pollard" wrote in news:h7tqk1$hm4$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

Isn't the simplest "validate" to copy the file set to a file with a new name? That should rebuild the indexes and clear up used space. Then if there are still problems, use validate on the copy. If that isn't good enough, supervalidate. Of course, backups are your friends ...